THE NEW YOR.KER. amount of sheer literary technique here-some of it effective, some of it fancy and self-conscious, and some of it just plain unconvincing-but he fails to resolve a fundamental ambiv- alence about the Waspy society he purports to find fault with. Fitzger- ald is cited a lot, but the book has none of his romantic conviction; in- stead, it's just edgy and knowing. FIRST HUBBY, by Roy Blount, Jr. (Villard; $18.95). It's 1993, and both the United States and Guy Fox have had a topsy-turvy year. First, the Marilyn Quayle coup attempt sabotaged the Bush Administration; then the Democrats stumbled with their "New Dukakis" campaign in the '92 election; and then, following a third-party Presidential victory, the new Chief Executive was struck down in a freak accident involving a fish. Clementine Fox, Guy's wife and the first woman Vice-President -Guy affectionately calls her "Your Heartbeatawayess" -thus suddenly becomes the first woman President. President Fox quickly proves to be an effective and popular Commander-in-Chief, but Guy, a pro- fessional Southern humor writer simi- lar in many ways to Roy Blount, Jr., finds himself getting panned in the press as "the least effective first spouse since Bess Truman." Mr. Blount's novel doesn't take off right away-there are a few too many flashbacks and digressions-but when it does, it manages to be simul- taneously funny about marriage and the highest office in the land, and it offers an emphatic and romantic "Yes" to the question "Can true love survive the Oval Office?" NOTE: "The Woman Lit by Fireflies," by Jim Harrison, has been published by Houghton Mifflin ($19.95). One of the novellas in this collection first appeared in The New Yorker. GENERAL Too GOOD TO BE TRUE: THE OUT- LANDISH STORY OF WEDTECH, by James Traub (Doubleday; $21.95). This author has collected the com- plicated, unedifying details of the Wed tech scandal and arranged them in an absorbing narrative. The com- pany, a small Bronx machine shop founded in 1970, realized in 1978 that since one of the partners was of Puerto Rican descent it might get special consideration for defense contracts as a minority-owned busi- ness. A congressman volunteered to help, for a price, and by 1984, when President Reagan extolled the firm as a minority enterprise that had brought employment to a depressed inner-city neighborhood, the owners and several new partners were sup- porting congressmen, bureaucrats, and middlemen who had intimate ties to the Administration. The orig- inal proprietors were hardly paragons, but they were taught fraud, and how to conceal it, by greedy, well-to-do, well-connected college graduates. Wedtech bled the government and, after going public, its shareholders, until there was nothing left with which to run the company. Bank- ruptcy, prosecutions, and convictions followed. Mr. Traub has found the right tone to make the outlandish plausible; his book is as entertaining as it is disheartening. THE SURREALIST PARADE, by Wayne Andrews (New Directions; $22.95 cloth, $11.95 paper ). Mr. Andrews, a solidly respectable cultural histori- an and architectural archivist, was also, in the persona of Montagu O'Reilly, a friend and associate of the Paris Surrealists, and the author of the fiction "Pianos of Sympathy" and other writings in the Surrealist vein. The present work (which he died before completing) is a kind of history-cum-portrait of the move- ment, filled with anecdotal stories of its leading spirits-André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Salva- dor Dalí. Mr. Andrews guides us through the movement's internecine warfare, noisy with cries of betrayal and sellout, and goes on to detail such things as the intricacies of the Sur- realists' domestic and sexual arrange- ments. His book is highly diverting, and at the same time a substantial study of a movement-or, at least, a disturbance-that left its mark on the art of the twentieth century. . Wine fanciers speak of the "foxy" aroma of wines made from labruscana grapes, which are cultivated descendents of the so- called fox grape species (Vitis labrusca) na ti ve to New England. Now a Cornell University researcher, Terry E. Acree, has found that the molecule responsible for the foxy odor is almost an identical twin of a molecule produced in the anal sac of the Japanese weasel, which had previously been said to have a "grape" smell.-Wash- ington Post. By whom? 111 I)@\!E BOOKS ON TAPE,INC. 12750 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, CA 91604 ! \,. 365 WAYS J 365 Ways ': YQll CAN SAVE YoU..Oan 5a:\(_' THE EARTH :, ',Earth ;t.,,;- AUTHOR MICHAEL YOOt.\N D :V VINER with PAT HILTON . .':. i '.,. READER: ED BEGLEY, Jr The earth is threatened by the effects of acid rai n, ozone depletion and hazardous waste. 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